Sad news broke over the weekend, with the announcement of the death of legendary film editor Dede Allen, who passed away on Saturday at the age of 86. Allen was a three-time Oscar nominee, who was also the first editor to receive solo credit on an American film, for her game-changing work on 1967’s “Bonnie and Clyde,” and was instrumental in many of the great films of 1960s and 1970s American cinema.
Allen was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in December 1923, and moved to Hollywood in the early 1940s to take a job as a messenger for Columbia Pictures. She swiftly moved up through the ranks, becoming a production runner and a sound editing assistant, before moving to New York with her husband, documentary producer Stephen E. Fleischmann, to edit commercials and low-budget movies like “Terror From The Year 5000.” She was recommended by Carl Lerner, her former mentor at Columbia, for her first major editing gig, Robert Wise’s film noir “Odds Against Tomorrow.”
That led to her outstanding work on “The Hustler,” before she received solo credit for the first time for any man or woman, on Arthur Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde.” By introducing stylistic touches like jump cuts (there are over 50 cuts in Bonnie & Clyde’s climactic shooting deaths, virtually unheard of at the time), imported from the French New Wave, she changed American filmmaking forever.
Allen went on to work with Penn again on the likes of “Little Big Man,” “The Missouri Breaks” and the terminally underrated “Night Moves,” and collaborated with other key directors of the period, including George Roy Hill on “Slap Shot,” and Sidney Lumet on “Serpico” and “Dog Day Afternoon,” pioneering the use of shock cutting and audio overlaps. She also cut “Reds,” “The Breakfast Club” and “The Addams Family,” among others, before working as an executive for Warner Brothers for much of the 1990s.
She made a triumphant return to the editing room with Curtis Hanson’s brilliant “Wonder Boys” in 2000, picking up her third Oscar nomination, while her final film, the Julia Roberts/Ryan Reynolds family drama “Fireflies in the Garden,” was released in 2008. It’s easy to undervalue her contribution to cinema, simply because she was so influential that many of her techniques are now featured everywhere, from animated films to TV procedurals, but make no mistake, Allen changed everything. Some of her best work can be seen below.